He was born May 20, 1936, a date to be commemorated because he was truly a great writer and contributed to a transnational, transcultural body of literature that is so much a part of what New York City really is all about.

(excerpted from The Daily News) The author of 17 novels, who was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico, and lived alone in Brooklyn, died at Lutheran Hospital on Aug. 25, said his agent Tom Colchie. Ed Vega Yunqué was “a great American writer as well as a great Puerto Rican writer,” he added. Vega Yunqué’s novels, such as ‘Blood Fugues’ and ‘Lamentable Journey of Omaha Bigelow Into the Impenetrable Loisaida Jungle,’ are modern classics.” His first novel ‘The Comeback’ was published in 1985.

Ed Vega Yunqué moved to New York from Puerto Rico in the mid 1940s. He was the stepfather of singer Suzanne Vega. The feisty writer was the director of the Clemente Soto Velez from 1993 to 2000.

His last novel was a comic false memoir about a Jewish woman who meets a Puerto Rican Romeo and falls in love. It had been tentatively titled “Rebecca Horowitz, Puerto Rican Sex Freak” but publication was cancelled by the publisher recently, said Colchie, who’d been trying to find another publisher.

Multichannel video projections onto parasitic, bomb-like sculptures activate MediaNoche’s architecture. Images of mass rallies and marching soldiers are juxtaposed to a man’s body, floating in dark, indeterminate waters. The sculptures act as bodies themselves, simultaneously inhabiting the physical space of the gallery and the projections of the sea, a dark field of liquid that alludes to contamination or oil. It should be noted that the English translation of Aguasmalas also references the private military company Blackwater, contracted by the US government to provide security services in Iraq.